1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to an image processing method and a computer readable medium for image processing, for displaying a medical image including a plurality of objects each having a visibility property of at least visible or invisible.
2. Description of the Related Art
A revolution is brought about in the medical field with the advent of a CT (Computed Tomography) apparatus and an MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) apparatus making it possible to directly observe the internal structure of a human body as the image processing technology using a computer moves forward; medical diagnosis using the tomographic image of a living body is widely conducted. While, three-dimensional structure inside of a human body is hard to understand simply from the tomographic image of a human body. Further, in recent years, as a technology for visualizing the complicated three-dimensional structure has advanced, for example, volume rendering for directly rendering an image of the three-dimensional structure from three-dimensional digital data of an object provided by a CT apparatus has been used for medical diagnosis.
FIG. 7 shows a screen displaying a scanned image and annotations superposed on the image for displaying task states, conditions, etc., of the image in a medical image processing apparatus. The screen in FIG. 7 displays a visualized scanned image 10 (in this case, chest) and its annotations, namely, a scanner name 11, a color bar 12 for associating brightness and color of the image with a physical value, X-Ray intensity at the exposure time and a slice interval 13, scanned patient name, age, and scanning date 14, a ruler 15 for determining the physical size of the image, a direction indication 16 for indicating the image orientation, and a window level WW/WL (image contrast) 17.
However, all annotations are not necessarily required in a specific diagnosis and thus some annotations can be set invisible. In this case, hitherto, it has been a common practice to set the visibility property of annotation to visible or invisible in a dialog box or on a menu.
FIG. 8 shows the case where the visibility properties of annotations are set in a dialog box. The patient name, radiation intensity, direction indication 2, color bars 1, 2, and 3 are checked in the dialog box shown in FIG. 8, whereby the visibility properties of the annotations can be set to visible. The checks are removed, whereby the visibility properties of the annotations can be set to invisible.
FIG. 9 shows the case where the visibility properties of annotations are set on a menu. Ruler and color bar are checked on an auxiliary menu of a pull-down menu shown in FIG. 9, whereby the visibility properties of the annotations can be set to visible. The checks are removed, whereby the visibility properties of the annotations can be set to invisible.
FIG. 10 shows a state in which some annotations are set visible in accordance with the setting of the dialog box or the menu. That is, FIG. 10 shows a state in which the radiation intensity 13, the ruler 15, the direction indication 16, and the window level indication 17 as the annotations are superposed on the image 10 to be diagnosed (the visibility properties are set to visible).
FIG. 11 is a flowchart to describe switching processing of such annotations. In an image processing method in a related art, when the user issues a request for changing an annotation to be made visible, first a dialog box for entering the type of annotations that can be made visible is shown (step S21). Here, the user sets the type of an annotation to be made visible in the dialog box (step S22). Accordingly, the setup annotation is made visible (step S23).
Thus, hitherto, when switching annotations to be made visible or invisible, it has been necessary to change the setting in the dialog box or on the menu, and the operation has been troublesome. Particularly, when the user cannot picture or recall the annotation from icons or texts, those annotations can never be used.
Furthermore, the correspondence between annotations and icons or texts in the dialog box is non intuitive. The awkwardness finding suitable annotations lead to poor usability. Particularly, in a medical diagnosis, often, different annotations are used for different types of medical image so that a large number of types of annotations exist and thus the dialog box and the menu become enormous and calling the dialog box or the menu on another screen takes much time and operation is cumbersome.